


when i watch the world burn all i think about is you

by aliceinacoma



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-21
Updated: 2019-06-21
Packaged: 2020-05-15 16:31:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19299502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aliceinacoma/pseuds/aliceinacoma
Summary: In every timeline, he still ends up in Betty’s room, his lips pressed against hers in a question.-Betty and Jughead navigate their newfound relationship. Season one.





	when i watch the world burn all i think about is you

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Bastille's "Doom Days."

He doesn’t remember the first time he met Betty Cooper. Not distinctly, anyway. What he does remember is a flash of yellow and a high-pitched giggle. Then, afterward, she was somehow just always there, ever-present in his periphery.

 

 _If I had to describe Betty Cooper,_ he writes in the third chapter of his book, _I wouldn’t call her beautiful. She’d scoff at such a bland description, and it would be a shallow estimation, anyway. Instead, I’d have to call her ‘resplendent.’ Un-ironically, which, of course, you know means that I hold her in the utmost esteem._

 

Shaking his head, he erases the description, settling instead for some piece of nonsense about Betty’s disinterest in playing the good girl stereotype she’d been so unwillingly cast as.

 

(A week later, he kisses her in her bedroom, and suddenly he has a whole arsenal of new words to describe the way her smile makes his stomach flip.)

 

—

 

Betty chews on her bottom lip as she studies the map they’ve pinned up on the bulletin board. The bags under her eyes tell him that she hasn’t been sleeping, a fact he’d chide her for if the same wasn’t true for him. Now that he’s moved in with the Andrews, some of the ever-present tension in his shoulders has eased, but he still lies awake turning over the facts - or lack of facts - in the Blossom case. He can’t help the feeling that they’re missing something glaring.

 

“Where would she go, Jug?” she asks for the thousandth time. He rubs a hand over his eyes, leaning back on the desk. They need a knew angle, he thinks, but none seem eager to present themselves.

 

Betty sinks down next to him, leaning lightly into his side. His heartbeat speeds up, somewhat wildly, at the contact, and he blushes at how ridiculous that makes him feel. _It’s just a girl_ , he thinks. _It’s just_ Betty.

 

Not that there’s anything ‘just’ about Betty. Every time she moves, he feels it like a tug on his own limbs, as if his body is programmed to lean ever-closer into her. It’s only been a couple of days since he kissed her in her bedroom and she smiled at him like he had just solved a very complex equation, but it hasn’t escaped him that they’ve started to finish each other’s sentences.

 

Jughead never imagined he’d find himself in such a symbiotic coupling - or, frankly, any coupling at all; romance was never high on his priorities - but the past month he’s found it difficult to breathe whenever Betty looks at him. He doesn’t hate the feeling.

 

Still, not much has changed in the days since their kiss. Chasing clues, coming up with half-baked theories, sitting across one another in a booth at Pop’s. Except now whenever they part ways she shyly tilts her face up towards him for a chaste kiss, blushing sweetly as she bounces away.

 

It’s like neither of them is sure how to proceed, which tracks, he supposes. Aside from Ethel Muggs’ unexpected smooch when they were ten, Betty’s the only girl he’s ever kissed. And it’s not like Betty’s had a parade of boyfriends, either, what with being so hung up on Archie for years.

 

Turning to him with a small frown, she says, “Hey Jug?”

 

“Mm?”

 

“Kiss me?” she asks quietly, her hand gracing his cheek. “It’s just,” she adds quickly, before he can comply, “I can’t think straight, and kissing you - it kind of helps, somehow? It’s like my brain goes quiet, for a minute, and - “

 

He cuts her off with a kiss, soft and earnest. As he pulls back, he tells her, “You don’t need a reason to kiss me, Betty.”

 

As a smile spreads across her face and she leans back into him, he realizes for the first time that the same is true for him.

 

—

 

During the day, he looks for clues and comes up with bizarre theories and eats too many burgers at Pop’s, but at night he dreams about different timelines, the ones where Jason Blossom is alive, where his dad isn’t an alcoholic, where his mom never ditched him to go to Toledo, where Fred Andrews and FP Jones worked out their shit and Jughead grew up in a house just down the block from a little blonde girl and red-headed boy.

 

In every timeline, he still ends up in Betty’s room, his lips pressed against hers in a question.

 

And she always smiles.

 

—

 

“Are you?” she asks as they walk down the hallway toward her physics class. He has history on the other side of the school, but he still walks her every morning anyway, usually so they can finish hashing out whatever lead they’ve stumbled upon but also because Jughead likes kissing her on the forehead as they linger outside of her classroom.

 

“Huh?” he asks. “Am I what?”

 

Betty blushes, biting her lip. “My boyfriend?” she says quietly, daring a quick glance up at him.

 

Jughead doesn’t smile because smiling seems like an assumption that he somehow deserves this - deserves to have landed himself in this reality where Betty blushes when he touches her and looks up at him through dark eyelashes. It seems more like something he’d write into his novel than anything that would actually happen to him in real life.

 

But here she is, looking up at him hopefully as they pause outside of her classroom.

 

“Do you want me to be?” he asks. He fiddles with a string on the edge of her sweater, as he admits, “I don’t know if I’d be any good at it.”

 

Betty grabs his chin, frowning at him. Instead of chastising him the way she usually does when he says something self-deprecating, she just presses her lips to his, wrapping her arms around his torso. They have yet to explore much in the realms of PDA - probably, Jughead thinks, because he’s generally adverse to most forms physical affection, private or public - but he leans into her anyway, cupping her cheek with his right hand and running his thumb along her jaw. He doesn’t think about who might be looking at them; it seems far less important than the heat of her skin under his touch.

 

She pulls away first, her eyes closed. “Just keep kissing me like that,” she murmurs. “You’ll be great.”

 

—

 

He and Archie talk it about exactly twice: the day after he kisses Betty in her room and once, when he’s staying at the Andrews.

 

“Jug?” Archie asks quietly, in a tone that Jughead can only describe as _contemplative._ Which is, well, it’s odd, coming from Archie, honestly; Archie’s all pure intentions but _thoughtful_ is not on the list of adjectives Jughead would use to describe him.

 

“Yeah?” he asks. It’s late, both of them waiting for sleep to overtake them.

 

“How long have you, you know, liked Betty?” Archie asks eventually, and Jughead stills. Even though he knows Archie rejected Betty at the beginning of the year, in a way he still feels a bit like he stole his best friend’s girl.

 

“Uh,” he says finally, struggling to calculate the safest answer. Eventually, he settles on as close to the truth as he’ll allow. “I don’t know. It just kind of slowly crept up on me, I guess.”

 

He doesn’t explain that he probably always liked her, not since puberty or childhood but since time started, maybe, or humans discovered that all the ways to verbally communicate love were inadequate.

 

Archie nods. “It’s kind of weird,” he admits. “I mean, I honestly never thought…” He cuts himself off, shaking his head as if to suggest what he never thought is unimportant. “But I am really happy for you guys.”

 

“Thanks, Arch,” Jughead says quietly. They fall asleep without further conversation.

 

—

 

Betty stumbles into the student lounge five minutes before the bell is about to ring. Late isn’t the Cooper style - not up to Alice’s standards anyway - but the lazy smile she flashes the group as she sinks into the couch next to Jughead assures him that her tardiness is a result of a blissful, dead sleep rather than some life-threatening problem or fresh wave of anxiety.

 

Veronica raises one perfect eyebrow at her as Betty greets everyone. Pursing her lips in amusement, the raven haired girl says, “Looks like _somebody_ had a good night.”

 

Betty tilts her head in confusion, and Veronica touches two fingers to the side of her own throat. Her eyes flashing with horrified recognition, Betty’s own hand leaps to her neck to cover the dark hickey at her pulse point.

 

Jughead flushes and looks away. It’s not that their friends don’t know about them; they do, and they seem, for the most part, supportive of the whole thing. But it’s one thing to acknowledge that they’ve added “holding hands” to the list of activities that he and Betty do together. It’s another thing to admit he’s been pushing her down into her bed and sinking his teeth into her.

 

Which was an accident, really. In her room, after the baby shower, they’d been piecing together possible motives for each of the suspects they still had in mind for Jason’s murder.

 

Betty was gesticulating wildly, her eyes alight as they worked through each suspect, and Jughead couldn’t help himself. He kissed her. Not nicely, either, like all those sweet, close-mouthed kisses they’d exchanged. Grabbing her ponytail, he pulled at her hair as her mouth opened under his, yielding and hungry all at once.

 

Taking a step back, he breathed a ragged, “Sorry.” He dropped his hands from her hair, feeling suddenly embarrassed. “I didn’t - “

 

She touched his arm. “Jug,” she said, her voice half an octave lower than usual. Daring to look back up at her face, he noticed her pupils were blown out; he barely suppressed a shudder as she licked her lip, glancing down at his mouth.

 

“Kiss me,” she murmured, fisting her hands in his jacket. “Like that,” she clarified, her eyes unwavering in their heat, even as a blush bloomed in her cheeks.

 

It wasn’t a request, so he bent down and did as he was told. Betty’s hands dropped from their place at his jacket only to guide his own hands to her waist as she opened her mouth to his once more. Emboldened by the feel of her tongue searching out his, he flattened his palms against her hips and walked them backward the bed until they were tumbling backwards onto it. Betty moaned and broke their kiss as he landed halfway on top of her, and he pushed himself up on his forearms to apologize.

 

Betty responded by sneaking a hand under his beanie to tug at the hair at the nape of his neck.

 

“Shut up,” she murmured, returning her lips to his. Jughead smiled against her lips. It was endearingly unsurprising that Betty would get bossy when they were…

 

Well, when they did this.

 

What was surprising was that Jughead liked it. He’d never given much concrete thought to sex. Porn wasn’t really up his alley, and sex always seemed like something he’d figure out later. He wasn’t like Archie. He had no desire to chase after girls.

 

Except one. And it was less of a chase and more of a falling into step. 

 

But Betty telling him what to do, pulling his hair, it felt…good. He had no idea what that meant, really, except that Betty could do most anything to him, and he’d just come back begging for more. He wondered, as she accidentally knocked his beanie off by running her fingers through his hair, how he could make her feel that way.

 

He settled, eventually, on running his thumb over the small strip of skin on her hip where her shirt had ridden up. She moaned at his touch, pulling away from his lips to kiss at the spot just under his ear. He took that as his cue to bury his face into her neck, placing open mouthed kisses from her jaw to her collarbone.

 

Betty groaned, needy, as he kissed her pulse point, so he lingered there, kissing her more firmly. Tentative, he licked at the spot once, twice.

 

“Juggie,” she whined, tightening her hands in his hair. When he nipped at the spot experimentally with his teeth, she gasped out a, “Fuck!”

 

Jughead chuckled. He’d heard Betty use that word about three times in her whole life. It was supremely satisfying to hear her use it as he pressed himself into her.

 

She sighed underneath him, gently scratching the back of his head. Jughead pressed his lips back to her neck, sucking at her pulse in earnest just to feel her tug at his hair again.

 

Now, in the student lounge, Kevin pulls Betty’s hand from her neck to examine the mark he left there.

 

“Damn,” he says, shaking his head in admiration. “Jughead Jones, who knew?”

 

“I’m a man of many talents,” he deadpans, trying to gain control of the situation. He can already hear the way Kevin’s going to grill Betty for the sordid details later, and he’s suddenly thankful that he and Archie don’t really talk about that stuff. It just feels too personal to divulge to anyone.

 

Veronica, meanwhile, gives him him an appreciative once-over that makes his skin crawl. He pulls his beanie down over his ears to try to hide his blush, glaring at her, but the raven-haired girl just shakes her head good-naturedly.

 

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of, B,” she insists. “You have a boyfriend who knows how to give it to you. It’s a badge of honor, really.”

 

Betty’s eyes widen comically. “Veronica!” she chides. Archie, too, blushes.

 

“Geez, Ronnie,” he says. “Come on, those are my best friends.”

 

Veronica smirks and takes a sip of her tea. “Sorry, Archiekins,” she says, and Jughead notes the particular way Veronica has of apologizing without appearing chastised at all.

 

—

 

Looking for clues with Betty is equally as good as kissing Betty until he can’t breathe anymore, and Jughead doesn’t know what that means, but he starts to suspect, about a month into their burgeoning relationship, that the feeling starts with the letter L.

 

—

 

After she shows him the crescent moons carved in the center of her hands, he can’t help the absent-minded way his fingertips trace over her palm, like he’s trying to exorcise the pain out of her in one gesture. There’s always been more to Betty than what the kids at school thought of her, and now he has another piece to add to the puzzle of Elizabeth Cooper.

 

Even if that piece terrifies him.

 

Not for himself. Chuck’s little reveal about the nature of her revenge only phases him because she didn’t tell him about it. But, he supposes, he didn’t tell her about ostensibly being homeless, so maybe they’re even.

 

She’s still on edge as he kisses her hands. “You don’t…” she falters, swallowing. “Do you think I’m crazy?”

 

It’s a question she returns to time and time again, like she needs reassurance that she’s standing on solid ground, a feeling Jughead can relate to intimately, if he’s being honest.

 

“No,” he says instantly. “I think Chuck’s an asshole, and he got what he deserved.”

 

Betty smiles gratefully. She takes a deep breath. “The thing is, though,” she adds, nervously playing with his fingers. “I kind of…liked it? Like it, um….”

 

“Turned you on,” he supplies when she can’t finish her sentence. Betty blushes, averting her eyes, and he traces gentle a finger down her face to coax her into looking back up at him again. “I mean, yeah,” he says when she does. “You, Betty Cooper, have a thing about control.”

 

It’s not a revelation to him, that Betty gets off on being in charge, on being a little mean even. They’ve hooked up in earnest a few times now, and it never fails to fascinate him the way she comes to life as he put his hands on her, murmuring commands into his ear as she digs her nails into his back.

 

He’s happy to oblige as long as she keeps touching him. 

 

“Doesn’t that…?” she asks. “I mean, isn’t it kind of weird?”

 

Jughead smiles at her, batting at her ponytail once in hopes of coaxing a smile out of her.

 

“Nah,” he says, tangling their fingers together. “I, uh, I like it.”

 

She raises her eyebrows at him. On a more polished girl, the gesture could be construed as seductive, but on Betty it’s genuine surprise.

 

“Really,” she says. “Good to know.”

 

—

 

“We could just leave,” she murmurs. It’s late; his dad’s been passed out for a while now, but he’s on the phone with Betty, their voices a whisper.

 

“Leave Riverdale?” he asks. Then, “You wouldn’t. Not before you know the truth.”

 

They’re the same this way, he thinks. Neither of them knows how to quite while they still can.

 

—

 

Everything is terrible.

 

Everything is terrible, even after, when they find out it was Clifford Blossom who murdered Jason, when FP refuses to name names, when he finds out he has to leave his friends behind for Southside High.

 

Everything is just awful, except for Betty.

 

He’s grateful to his mom, for the first time in months, just for being as flaky as she is. He tries to tell Betty as much as she wraps her arms around him outside of his new school, but it comes out all mangled.

 

He’s been trying his best to force down the sentiment that threatens to bubble over in his chest. They’ve been dating for a little over two months now, and that’s just too early - too early to admit she’s his first concern in everything, that he’d happily solve mysteries with her for the rest of his life.

 

He doesn’t want to freak her out, and there’s also a part of him that doesn’t want to admit what a goner he already is.

 

But after the Jubilee, as she promises him she’ll never give up on his dad, he lets himself collapse. Two people are dead, he thinks, several families destroyed. Maybe, just maybe, they all deserve whatever piece of happiness they can grasp.

 

“I love you, Betty Cooper,” he murmurs, and looking at her across the trailer, he’s suddenly not afraid that she won’t say it back.


End file.
